The Dogs of Pilothead Sound

Plagued by strange dreams of Native dancers and winged dogs, Lucjan Cassidy escapes to a new career as a lighthouse keeper only to find a tenant already in residence, a washed-up actor on dangerous, unknown meds, and a terrifying heritage even his agent/uncle doesn't know.

Illustrated series, high-quality fiction and very unusual; please read description on author's page before you purchase. More

In this first book of the Pilothead Sound series, when the “strange-eyed” Lucján Cassidy, a burned-out illustrator/photographer, is offered a job as caretaker of an historic lighthouse in an eccentric, canine-oriented town on the coast of Maine, he little dreams that, far from merely erasing his heartbreaking past, he’s crossing into a life of joy and sorrow beyond all sane expectations. After Justin Sayers, sheriff of Pilothead Sound, pulls him from his car after it plummets off a bridge and into a river, Cass finds himself stepping eerily yet naturally into a gap left in the Sayers family by the suicide of Justin’s brother-in-law, in which he becomes a friend to Paul’s widow, Ellynne, and a surrogate uncle to her daughter, the talented but singularly unlovable Kippie.Distracted by a brutal murder in a town near the Sound, Justin neglects to inform Cass that he’ll be sharing his new residence with Marten Lawrie, a has-been film star whose frightful legacy forces his agent-uncle to exile him from the family’s compound on a Dakotah Sioux rez in Canada and ship him to the Sound to find a home—and rehabilitation—amongst acquaintances in the town’s Native population. While Cass simultaneously works at building a new life and concealing the secret that could if made public render him a social outcast, Lawrie struggles to break free of a terrible bondage and regain his health and the respect of the tribal clans whose legacy he has spurned.Meanwhile, half a world away, Abel Cruz, a saintly youth with a terrifying bloodline and a powerful anointing, endures battles of his own as he seeks to reunite his scattered family and find the missing brother who will conquer and eject a controlling cartel from the ancient and hidden jungle citadel at the heart of the disguised empire that is their inheritance. Dark research and the confiscating of the ancient kingdom’s natural resources are part of a campaign to re-create a frightening arsenal of bio-nutronics whose reaches span the oceans to have unexpected effects upon Cass’s home in the beautiful seaside communities with a strange history of their own. Both Cass and Lawrie are thus forced to reevaluate their perceptions of good and evil and what is holy or profane when they are caught in the cross-currents of a centuries-old spiritual battle for which their own new-found faith can barely begin to prepare them.Likewise seeking to understand and prepare themselves for the extraordinary conflict that has interrupted their ordinary lives are Cass’s companions: Cato St. John, the shamanistic son of the Native quarter’s Traditionalist headman, and Jon, his non-Indian stepbrother; also Father Mario Giocando, a disillusioned young priest, Gastón, a chef, Robert BelCampo, a former Broadway star, and Annie and Kevin, farmers whose autistic son is supernaturally healed by the last person they’d expect to aide them.With these friends-for-life accompanying him in his unlooked-for and ultimately far-flung adventures, Cass pursues a new lifestyle that is supremely domestic, only to be drawn more and more into the strange beauty of the legend that is Pilothead Sound, and the far from ordinary dogs whose alertness guards its boundaries in the form of the Shadow-Dogs, a clan of specially-bred Canines trained to alert the towns of spiritual threats. Indeed, it’s not only the pack of strange, wolflike dogs that are startlingly wise and aware, but dogs, cats, and other notable wildlife in the area, canny little souls whose actions render the expression “dumb animals” inappropriate indeed.